The High Court victory of Epping Forest District Council has made news in France. The decision to temporarily block migrants from being housed in The Bell Hotel was covered by newspapers such as Le Monde and Le Figaro.
The latter provided some context to the growing tension in England, noting that the migrants in Epping are just a few of the estimated 32,000 migrants housed in hotels ‘at the expense of the British taxpayer.’
Geezuz! @fancypants_s https://t.co/uvA0ajlXlJ
— Auntie Polly (@auntie_polly) August 23, 2025
h/t Auntie Polly
Establishments that used to be open 24/7 now close early. Why?
On a recent Sunday evening, Imad Khachan encountered a problem once unthinkable in New York City. “I had a friend and his wife visiting from overseas,” says Khachan, the owner of Chess Forum, Greenwich Village’s last remaining chess shop. “They stopped by and said, ‘We’d like to go have dinner around nine o’clock.’ . . . I understand it was Sunday, but we really were hard-pressed to find a place that opened till 10 o’clock, let alone 24 hours. I couldn’t tell them where we [should] go. I felt so embarrassed.”
In the notes for his unfinished final novel, The Last Tycoon, F. Scott Fitzgerald famously and portentously wrote “there are no second acts in American lives.”
Nowhere is this less true than in politics, American or otherwise.
Indeed, when I met Donald Trump in 1997, he was a has-been who patiently waited alone in the bowels of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre to be interviewed by a city reporter for a fluffy human-interest story.
For more than 40 years, the people of Iran have lived under a suffocating dictatorship that has stripped them of their freedoms, denied them basic human rights, and crushed any glimmer of hope for a better future. Yet despite the unrelenting repression, the Iranian people have never stopped dreaming of liberty. They have taken to the streets again and again, often at unimaginable personal risk, demanding the right to live in dignity and determine their own future. Each time, they have been met with the full force of a ruthless regime that treats dissent as treason and humanity as an afterthought. This struggle for freedom is not a fleeting political cause — it is the very heartbeat of a nation that refuses to surrender its spirit.
Many Canadians are complaining they can’t reach anyone at the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) by phone to address important tax matters, and the union representing agency workers has joined affected taxpayers in pleading with the federal government to fix the problem.
“It’s just so frustrating and disappointing,” said Krista Tucker Petrick of North Bay, Ont., one of several affected taxpayers interviewed by CBC News.
She said she has been calling the CRA at least twice daily for weeks to deal with her late stepmother’s estate.
h/t DS
Last month, award-winning singer Emily Portman got a message from a fan praising her new album and saying “English folk music is in good hands”.
That would normally be a compliment, but the Sheffield-based artist was puzzled.
So she followed a link the fan had posted and was taken to what appeared to be her latest release. “But I didn’t recognise it because I hadn’t released a new album,” Portman says.
After kayaking across the Detroit River earlier this month, an American asylum-seeker stepped into Canada unsure of what to expect, but considers the reaction so far positive – including a stranger giving him $100.
“I hate the fact that I did what I did, but what was my choice? I was scared,” said Dan Livers, 51, of Michigan. “I hope to become a citizen.
Scientists are removing words like “diverse” and “disparities” from hundreds of federal grant renewals to avoid getting flagged in the Trump administration’s focus on eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion programs, a Wall Street Journal analysis shows.
At least 600 research projects funded by the National Institutes of Health have been modified in the fiscal year starting in October to remove terms associated with diversity, equity and inclusion, the Journal analysis found. Nearly all of those projects were multiyear grants that had already been approved but were up for routine annual reviews. The modified grants were worth $480 million this cycle.
It’s the smart thing to do.
Global Affairs Canada has a spending problem.
Taxpayers deserve a full inquiry into the department and Prime Minister Mark Carney needs to take a chainsaw to its $8.6-billion budget.
Bureaucrats at GAC spent taxpayer money treating Canadian women who went to Syria to join ISIS to a luxurious trip back home, according to Global News.
FBI agents raided the Maryland home of President Donald Trump’s former National Security Adviser John Bolton on Friday, as part of a “high-profile national security probe” involving classified documents.
Ironically, the same people who cheered Joe Biden for weaponizing the Justice Department against Trump are claiming that the raid on Bolton’s home was politically motivated.
The Ottawa Police Service said a man had been arrested and charged in relation to a hate-motivated incident where a Muslim woman was assaulted on an OC Transpo bus last week.
On Wednesday, Aug. 20, police said officers had arrested a man, but did not identify him publicly “due to mental health being a contributing factor.”
Nigel Farage has unveiled Reform UK’s plans for “mass deportations” and a dismantling of the so-called human rights codes that facilitate the “crisis” of illegal immigration.
The Brexit boss and current favourite to become the next prime minister of the United Kingdom, Nigel Farage, said that his government would enact a policy of “detain and deport” rather than allowing mostly military age illegal migrant males to claim asylum and be housed at taxpayer expense.
The Ontario public school network is a systemically polluted ecosystem. This isn’t my opinion. The evidence is in, and it stinks to high heaven.
A recent survey on antisemitism in three Ontario school boards, submitted by then federal envoy for combatting antisemitism Deborah Lyons tallied 781 antisemitic incidents in Ontario K-12 schools, most of which occurred in metropolitan Toronto. Many involved Nazi tropes (“Heil Hitler,” “Hitler was right”). One in six were teacher-initiated or involved school-sponsored activities.
In a particularly chilling Oct 2024 incident, an Ottawa six-year-old was told by her teacher that, since one of her parents is Jewish, she is only “half human.” In Nazi Germany, treatment of such children “vacillated between persecution, semi-toleration, and racial reclassification.” Sound familiar?
To Mexican companies, the rule was never much of a problem, largely ignored by the American authorities, especially along a border where cultures had always mixed.
But to the Trump administration, it is a point of critical road safety that went too long unaddressed.
The issue? English.
